25

“I can explain all this,” Weezy said, gesturing to the high stacks of newspapers all around her. “I haven’t got the Collyer disease.”

Jack smiled. “Yeah. I’m sure you have an excellent reason for keeping every one of these.”

“Believe it or not, I do.”

Jack had taken a meandering course through Queens until he was certain he wasn’t being tailed. Then, after assuring himself her place was empty, he’d left her there and driven the panel truck out to North Corona. He wiped down anything he and Weezy might have touched, then left it in a lot on 108th Street. He didn’t know if the police would be looking for it, but it could go unnoticed there for a while. He took the subway back to Jackson Heights and walked up from Roosevelt Avenue, picking up a six-pack of Yuengling lager along the way.

During the interval Weezy had showered and changed into a sweatshirt and jeans that were a bit small for her. Her black hair was wet and glossy, and she’d combed it to the side, covering her stitches.

“Can we start at the beginning?” Jack said.

Weezy nodded. “Probably the best way. Let’s go into the kitchen where we can sit.”

Once they were settled, Jack set the six-pack on the table next to the computer, twisted the cap off a bottle, and offered it to her. She took it and sipped.

“Never had this before. Good.” She held up the bottle. “The downfall of my waistline: pizza and beer.”

“You look good.”

And he meant it. The extra pounds enhanced her. She’d been skinny to the point of boyishness in high school.

“I’m fat.”

“Women don’t know what fat is.” How many times had he heard Gia complain about the “enormity” of her perfect butt? “As they say, real women have curves.”

“Well, I’ve got bulges on those curves.”

“You’re way too hard on yourself.”

He cracked a brew for himself and took a long pull.

Aaaah.

Suppressing a burp, he changed the subject. “Never had a Yuengling? Please don’t tell me you drink Bud.”

Her dark eyebrows rose. “My old friend Jack is a beer snob?”

“And proud of it.”

She smiled. “No Bud—Coors Light. I tell myself I’m cutting calories as I use it to wash down pepperoni pizza.” Her smile faded. “I’m a widow, you know.”

Jack nodded. “Eddie told me. I’m sorry.”

“I am too. Things were going great. Then, four years ago, he bought a gun, took the train out to Flushing Meadow Park, sat with his back against a big oak, and put a bullet through his brain.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said again. And he was. He sensed a deep, lingering hurt. “Did he leave a note?”

“Yeah. ‘It’s all become too much. I’m sorry. Love, Steve.’ And that was it.” She sighed. “Never a hint that anything was wrong.”

Jack tried to imagine how he’d feel if Gia ever did something like that. He failed. At least Steve had thought enough of her to do it where she wouldn’t be the one to find his body.

She sipped her beer, then said, “Anyway, as I was going through his things, I went into his laptop and found lots of bookmarks to Nine/Eleven Truther sites. We’ve both always been into conspiracies and apparently this one tickled him.”

“Could there be any connection between his . . . death and what happened to you today?”

She shook her head. “That’s tempting, but no. The police traced his movements—applying for the gun permit, waiting for the background check . . . apparently he’d been planning it for some time. I never had a clue. I still don’t have any idea why. I don’t think I ever will.” She shook her head. “But that’s not the story. The story is that as I skimmed a few of the sites I came across a photo of bin Laden and his top two deputies, al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef. Here. See for yourself.”

She turned to her computer and began typing. Soon a black-and-white photo of three bearded guys in turbans popped up. Jack recognized bin Laden but not the others.

“I kept staring at it, feeling something was wrong. And then it hit me. I’d seen the photo before and was sure there’d been a fourth man in it. So I did an image search, but every time I found it, only the same three were in it. No sign of the fourth.”

Jack feigned shock. “Don’t tell me the famous Weezy Connell memory hiccupped?”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Not funny. I was worried it had.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“True, but it’s never let me down yet. So I went hunting through newspapers and magazines.”

“Ah,” Jack said, glancing at the stacks that filled the neighboring dining room. “I’m beginning to see.”

“I was pretty sure I’d seen it in the Times, but I wasn’t sure of the date.”

More mock shock: “You forgot?”

“I never forget what I read, but I’m not always aware of the date when I’m reading it, so my brain doesn’t form a connection. Anyway, I bought a bunch of back issues from the immediate post–nine/eleven period and found it.”

“Where on Earth do you buy old newspapers?”

“Google ‘vintage newspapers’ and you’ll see.” She popped up from her seat. “Here, I’ll show—oh!”

Swaying, she clutched the back of the chair.

Jack leaped to his feet and grabbed her arm.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just dizzy. Not ready for sudden movements yet, I guess.”

“Maybe you’d better lie down.”

She shook him off. “No way. But maybe a beer isn’t such a good idea.”

She left the bottle behind and led him on a winding course through the stacks in the living room. She stopped by one next to the stairs to the second floor, counted down to the sixth issue, and pulled out a copy of the Times.

Handing it to Jack, she said, “Check out page four.”

Jack did just that, and immediately spotted the photo.

“I’ll be damned.”

The exact same configuration of bin Laden and his buds, but this one showed an extra man. The fourth was bearded and turbanned like the others but caught in profile instead of face on—as if he’d been turning away from the camera when the shutter clicked.

Weezy was tapping a finger against her temple. “Never forgets.”

“Who’s the fourth guy?”

“Remember I mentioned The Man Who Wasn’t There? That’s him. Wahid bin Aswad.”

“But what’s the point of taking him out of the photo?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.” She crooked her finger at him as she headed back toward the kitchen. “There’s more.”

Back at the computer she plugged in her network cable, opened the New York Times site, and found that issue. But the photo showed only three men.

Jack blinked. “Somebody hacked the Times.”

“Yes. Twice. Because I contacted them—anonymously, of course—and told them the photo had been altered. I watched daily and soon the original was restored. Days later, the doctored photo was back in its place.”

Baffled, Jack dropped into a chair. “But what does the hacker hope to accomplish? Copies of the real photo have to be all over the place.”

“But they’re not. The real, four-man photo exists in newspapers, which are disposable. They wind up either recycled or used as landfill or fish wrapping or on the bottom of birdcages. More and more, people are looking to the Internet for their reading and research. If they blog about nine/eleven and want to include this photo, they snag it from the Times’s site or from someone else who previously borrowed from the Times. And later on, folks snag it from that blog for some use of their own. And on and on and on. The doctored version of that photo is everywhere on the Web. The original with Wahid bin Aswad . . . is nowhere.”

Jack shook his head. “But why?”

“I don’t know. But it’s pretty clear that since nine/eleven, someone’s been trying to rewrite history. Someone’s trying to erase evidence that Wahid bin Aswad was with bin Laden and company on that day, or on any day, for that matter.”

“What do you mean, ‘any day’?”

She started mousing around and opened a photo file.

“I did an image search for bin Laden and collected any in which he appeared to be part of a group photo. Then I traced them as best I could to their origins—almost always online news sources. I bought up a lot of old papers and searched out those photos. I found three more that had been altered. In all instances, a single figure had been removed.”

“Let me guess: Wahid bin Asswipe.”

Weezy frowned. “Oh, that’s mature.”

“I have a wide streak of immaturity, Weez. I nurture it. And I have a big problem showing even a flyspeck of respect toward bin Laden and his buddies.”

“This is serious, Jack.”

“Is it? Why?”

“Because the Internet is becoming the source of record for all but the most serious and dedicated researchers.” She clicked on an icon and the doctored three-shot popped onto the screen. “This is a lie. And it’s a lie that’s being told again and again all over the Web every time it’s copied and posted somewhere else. Tell a lie often enough and it can become the truth. Someone is expunging all photographic evidence of Wahid bin Aswad from the Web. Not mentions of his name—those have remained untouched—just the images.”

She wiggled and clicked her mouse again and started a slide show of photos.

“Look,” she said, tapping the screen over a figure in a group photo. “Here he is at a meeting in Kandahar—I scanned this from a newspaper.” A click and the photo changed. “Here’s the version that’s all over the Web.”

Sure enough, one of the bearded wonders was missing from the second photo. The same was true for the next two pairings.

Jack leaned back. “Now that’s weird. Why just the photos? Why not erase all trace?”

“Obviously he doesn’t want anyone to know what he looks like.”

“Sounds to me like a guy who’s planning to reinvent himself as a regular, everyday guy.”

“Maybe not a regular everyday guy. Maybe someone a lot of people are going to see, someone who doesn’t want anyone making the connection.”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “These photos aren’t the best quality, and one bearded guy looks a lot like another.” He ran a hand over his own short beard. “See what I mean?”

She laughed, then hunched her shoulders and grabbed her head. “Oh!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Need to remember not to laugh.” Whatever it was passed quickly and she looked back at him. “You’ll never pass for an Arab. You’re—” Her computer dinged and she clicked around until . . . “E-mail from Kevin.”

“Harris? You trust him?”

She nodded. “As far as being someone genuinely searching for the truth about this, yes. As for his past, whatever he says about that is a lie—unless he tells you he’s ex-NSA.”

Alarm buzzed down Jack’s spine. “What?”

“Strictly low level, and I believe he was let go because of his nine/eleven beliefs.”

“Swell.”

“You say that a lot.”

“I’ve had lots of cause today. How do you know?”

She pointed at the monitor. “With a little know-how and a lot of patience, you’d be amazed what you can find on the Web. I even found you, the Man Who Isn’t There.”

Jack didn’t like that. If Weezy could find him, so could others. Getting harder and harder to stay under the radar. Why couldn’t people shut up? These goddamn bloggers with their incessant nattering, feeling they have to be saying something all the time just to fill the empty space on their blog page, and so they talk about some guy they heard about from a friend of a friend of a cousin of an uncle who met this guy named Jack once who might be real or maybe just an urban legend.

Yeah. Urban legend. Go with that.

And. Then. Shut. Up.

Weezy leaned closer to the screen. “It’s got a jpeg attached. He must have scanned his photo of Bashar Sheikh.”

“That photo kind of bothers me,” he said as she downloaded it. “How did he get it?”

Weezy shrugged. “He still has friends in NSA. Probably got a little help.” She glanced at Jack. “His heart’s in the right place.” She hit a few more buttons. “Now to decrypt it.”

Jack said nothing. Maybe she was right. He’d seemed genuinely relieved to find her alive in the hospital.

“Okay,” Weezy said. “Let’s open the photo.”

A head shot of—surprise!—a bearded guy in some sort of Muslim skullcap popped into view.

“Harris told me he looked familiar but—”

“He does. Let me pop him up in another photo.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised that she recognized him right off, but her perfect memory never ceased to amaze him. One of the undoctored photos she’d run through before appeared and she tapped the screen.

“There he is, standing right next to bin Aswad. He’s never been identified, but was obviously one of the nine/eleven planners. Now we have a name for him.”

She typed out a response, telling Harris where to look, and sent it off.

“So, you’ve identified Sheikh,” Jack said. “You think he’s going to lead you to bin Asswi—” Weezy shot him a look. “Okay, okay—bin Aswad?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But it’s one more piece of the puzzle. I—” The computer gave out another ding! “Kevin again.”

Jack watched as the decrypted e-mail appeared on the screen.

 

OMFG!!! I recognize him now! That’s the guy in the torture video I told you about. We need to talk!

 

“Torture video?” Jack said as Weezy rapid-fired a response.

 

Not tonight. Save it for tomorrow.

 

She straightened and faced Jack. “Years ago someone sent Kevin—via his blog—the URL to a specific video on a site that specialized in torture porn. The sender said he’d find it ‘interesting.’ Kevin told me he’d tried to watch but lasted only a minute or so. Said it was sickening.”

“Why would someone send him that?”

Weezy shrugged. “He has a nine/eleven site and blog—maybe someone thought he’d like to see an al Qaeda suspect being tortured. He said the whole site was devoted to torture videos.”

“A YouTube for sadists.” Jack added that to the long list of things he didn’t understand about his species—before pierced nostrils but after Lou Reed. “You think this Bashar Sheikh might have been the torturee?”

“If I’m reading Kevin right, he was.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I could handle a torture video on a good day. But tonight, with my stomach already rocky . . . no way.”

Jack quaffed the rest of his beer and was reaching for another when he spotted hers, barely touched.

“You’re sure you don’t want it?”

“I’d love it but I’d better not. Don’t let it go to waste.”

“Beer? Never.” He took a sip and said, “Al Qaeda, the Dormentalists, the Septimus Order . . . you’ve got some heavy hitters there. You sure you want to be a ‘person of interest’ to them?”

“I don’t want to be a person of interest to anyone, but it might not even be them. Maybe we’ll get an idea when they identify that blond man.”

“You said you saw him in an Internet café?”

She nodded. “I rotate my sites but maybe they had some staked out. I mean, I’ve used that place before. But I noticed he got a call and then began looking around. They must have traced my IP address after I logged on. He followed me out of the café and I began to run . . .” She touched her scalp. “And that’s all I remember until I woke up today.” She shook her head. “So weird not to remember something.”

“Sometimes forgetting is good.”

Her expression turned bleak. “Sometimes I wish I could.”

Without warning she stepped closer, put her arms around him, and pulled herself against him, pressing her face against his shoulder. She was trembling.

“I get so scared at times,” she said, her voice muffled.

After a few heartbeats, Jack put his beer down and returned the embrace. How could he not? She was Weezy. Not the angular body he remembered from their youth, but this was nice . . . better. They’d kissed a few times growing up, but never anything beyond that, never anything serious. It might have gone further if not for her mood swings, and the medications her doctors tried. They drifted apart, drifted close, then apart again. But always, always remained friends.

“Right now, I think you’ve got good cause to be.”

“But it’s not just this. It’s my brain. It catalogs everything. But that’s not where the trouble lies. It’s my subconscious. It’s got all that information at its disposal—there aren’t many brains that can store and retrieve like mine—and as it filters through the jumble, it starts making correlations, spotting patterns, forming possible explanations for what it sees. Sometimes it tells me, sometimes it doesn’t. Most times it’s not important—curious at best—but sometimes it’s . . . terrifying.”

“H. P. Lovecraft once said something about how we’d go mad if we knew the real truth.”

“You mean, ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents’?”

“Is that a quote?”

She nodded against him. “Uh-huh.”

“Exact, I suppose.” He had no doubt.

Another nod. “He also said, ‘The piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ My problem is that my brain can correlate all its contents, and it’s flashing me glimpses of that terrifying reality, and I wish it weren’t.”

“Even as a kid you seemed to have an intuition about this stuff.”

“I knew there was a Secret History—I didn’t know the whole story, or even a fraction of it, but I sensed that much of what people considered true was really an elaborate fiction.”

“And what’s your subconscious say about nine/eleven?”

“That everybody’s wrong. And by everybody, I mean the government, I mean the nine/eleven conspiracy theorists, even al Qaeda—bin Laden himself doesn’t know the whole truth. Probably thinks he does, but he’s been used just like so many others through history.”

“And you do know the truth?” he said, thinking, Please don’t say yes.

“No, I don’t. And neither, I think, does my subconscious. But it knows something is very wrong with the stories out there. It’s a perfect example of the Secret History. Bin Laden says—and believes, I’m sure—that he attacked the World Trade Towers to strike a blow for Islam and because of the U.S.’s meddling in the Middle East. That will go down as accepted history. But the Secret History could very well be that a group, some secret society or cabal—through inspiration, insinuation, manipulation, and whatever other means—used him to bring down those towers for an entirely different reason.”

Jack couldn’t buy it.

“Why on Earth—?”

“I don’t know. But when I noticed bin Aswad being erased from the photographic record, my subconscious clicked into high gear and didn’t like what it saw. It needed more info, so I began gathering it.”

“The papers and magazines . . .”

“Yes. They can’t be changed. They may not be true, they may be packed with errors, but those errors and untruths are the same as the day the ink hit their paper. The Secret History is there, hidden behind that ink. If only someone would write it down and give me a copy, I could figure it out. But I don’t think it’s ever been written down. I think it’s passed from generation to generation through oral tradition.”

Jack flashed on a certain weird and wonderful book.

“What about the Compendium of Srem?”

She pushed away and stared at him. “The Compendium? How does a skeptic like you even hear of that?”

He was tempted to tell her he had the world’s only copy sitting back in his apartment, but she’d drive him nuts to see it. He’d have to tell her eventually, maybe even tomorrow, but better to spring it on her.

“Someone told me a tale about Torquemada—”

“And how he tried to destroy it but couldn’t, so he buried it and built a monastery over it. I’ve heard that one. Well, if the Compendium was ever under that monastery—if the book ever even existed—it’s not there now. Lots of people have searched for it and come up empty-handed.”

“You never know.”

She smiled. “Right. Probably shelved in the restricted section of Miskatonic U—right next to the Necronomicon.”

Jack grabbed his beer and finished it. “Gotsta go.”

“Oh, no.” Her smiled vanished. “You can’t. It’s been so many years and we’ve just reconnected and there’s so much to talk about and . . . and I don’t want to be alone here tonight.”

“You mean, stay the night?”

“Sure. I’ve got a spare bedroom.”

“Not filled with papers?”

“We can move them. Please?”

He understood her fright, and felt obliged to ease it, but still . . .

“I guess I should ask,” she said, peering at him as he hesitated. “Are you married?”

“Not officially.”

“Then what?”

“Functionally.”

“Monogamous?”

He nodded. “Very.”

She frowned. “Odd. From what I gathered about you, I figured you’d be more the lone-wolf type.”

“Used to be. Spent a lot of years that way after leaving home. It was a blast at first.”

“I imagine so. I sense you became a bad boy, and all the bad girls love a bad boy.”

He experienced a brief torrent of memories, a flash flood of faces.

“Yeah, they do. But then you find a good woman, and she makes you want to become a good man, or at least a better one. And so you try to be.”

She was staring at him. “What’s her name?”

“Gia.”

“You say it like a prayer.”

“I don’t pray. But if I ever did, she’d be an answer.”

Silence lingered briefly, then, “To feel that way about someone . . . to have someone feel that way about you . . . Steve and I had a bond like that. At least I thought we did. I miss it. You’re both lucky. I’d like to meet her someday.”

“No reason why you shouldn’t.”

“So you’ll stay the night?”

Another spasm of hesitation, then . . . why not?

This was Weezy asking. How could he say no?

“Okay, but I’ll have to make some calls.”